


Such a Mercy

by kay_obsessive



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fix-It, Low Chaos (Dishonored), Post-Canon, Post-Dishonored: Death of the Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-05 13:56:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21209666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_obsessive/pseuds/kay_obsessive
Summary: Billie Lurk put her own life on the line to follow a dead man into the Void and kill a god, and somehow she brought all three of them back out alive. It was far more than he expected from her, and he’d always expected quite a lot.





	Such a Mercy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [syrupwit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/gifts).

The boy who was once the Outsider falls asleep quickly when he has the chance, like a few thousand years’ worth of exhaustion came crashing down over him all at once.

Billie shares a look with Daud, and he watches as she stands and crosses the room to throw a blanket over the boy and the moth-eaten settee he’s chosen to treat as a bed. “Just imagine him catching cold and dying after all this,” she mutters, shaking her head, and then she just stands there for a while, looking down with a mildly incredulous expression, like she’s still trying to grapple with the absurdity of it all.

Daud is sure much the same look is living on his own face, wondering at how they managed this, at all the odd turns that led them here. Billie Lurk put her own life on the line to follow a dead man into the Void and kill a god, and somehow she brought all three of them back out alive. It was far more than he expected from her, and he’d always expected quite a lot.

“Do you remember that whale you put down in the slaughterhouse back in Dunwall?”

She is looking at him now, and it takes Daud a moment to pull himself from his current thoughts, then another to really recall what she’s talking about. Such a small detail in all the chaos from that time, pausing in his pursuit of Rothwild’s information to move the heavy oil tanks into place and pull the switch that let the poor creature breathe its last. Ignoring, for a moment, the Outsider’s riddles in his head, the guilt of an empire’s death gnawing at his heart, and focusing only on Billie’s eyes watching him from somewhere high in the rafters.

He catches her eye now and nods. “I remember.”

“I always wondered why you did that.”

“You wanted me to,” he says without pause, and when Billie stares at him, frowning in confusion, he shrugs and glances away. “You never asked much of me back then. Demanded, sometimes, but hardly ever asked. If you wanted the beast put out of its misery, well, that was something I could do.”

“All for me, huh?” Billie laughs a little, shaking her head as she comes back to sit down beside him. They’re sharing a much smaller seat than the one the boy has claimed, the only other piece of usable furniture in this tiny abandoned apartment they’ve found, and her face is very close to his when she says, “I think I’m glad I didn’t know that until now. I had a hard enough time trying to figure you out back then. Thought I had you pegged for years before, thought I knew my time was finally coming, and then everything you did for those few weeks just threw me off. Don’t know what I would have done with one more thing to feel guilty over.”

Daud doesn’t respond at first. It’s the most either of them has ever spoken of Billie’s betrayal. “That was a long time ago,” he eventually says after too long a silence, as though almost everything between them wasn’t a long time ago. “What made you think of it now?”

She nods toward the boy. “That’s what he used to sound like when he talked. Guess I only noticed it when it stopped.”

Daud pauses in the middle of rubbing the back of his neck, has to reach far back in his memory for the last time he actually heard the Outsider’s smug, taunting voice. There had always been a strange echo behind it all, something eerie and far away and oddly musical. Familiar in a way he could never quite pin down before.

The boy’s voice now sounds small and dull compared to that. Sounds human, he supposes.

“Hm,” Daud mumbles. “Never noticed either.”

“Funny how I used to wonder so much about that.” Billie sighs and leans back, leans against him, shoulder to shoulder. “So, what are we going to do with him?” she asks.

Daud considers the boy across the room. Once a source of great awe and terror, of torment and dread and delight. No more. Just a kid now, sickly and underfed, tossing and turning restlessly while he and Billie hover and watch on like anxious parents. 

All the odd turns that led them here.

He thinks again of the slaughterhouse. They always call it singing when the whales cry out, even when they’re being strung up and gutted and drained of everything they have. No wonder it took so long for anyone to notice the Outsider was also screaming in pain, begging to be put out of his own misery. Daud only ever knew one way of granting such a mercy, but Billie, his quick and clever Billie, had found another way through that he never could have imagined.

“Well, you’re the one who brought him here,” he begins, and Billie snorts in mock annoyance and elbows him in the side before he can add, “and I’m the one who sent you after him. I suppose that makes him our responsibility.”

She laughs. “Like a stray hound we decided to feed?”

“If you like,” he says, smiling a bit at the thought. “We can’t stay here long, anyway. Whenever we move on, he’ll come along if he wants.”

Billie leans back against him again, heavily this time, yawning and stretching, settling in. “Tomorrow sounds good to me.”

“Tomorrow,” he agrees, shifting to get comfortable, moving his arm to let her in even closer. 

It’s more than any of them thought they might have.


End file.
